living fully. fully living.

Fighting an uphill battle…..

I have long been bitching about social injustice. I hate it. It’s probably the one thing that will really get me going if need be. I can rant and rave about all kinds of crap if I need or want to. The first time I got a real taste of how much I actually hated it was (don’t laugh) when I was watching Law & Order: SVU at my friends’ house very very late (early?) one night. I barely remember the story, but it involved a high school girl getting picked on incessantly at school. I am well-versed in this kind of torture. High school and junior high were hell for me (but, in reality, Jr. high is hell for everyone and it should be totally optional, if you ask me). But this story went far beyond the kind of crap I had to put up with. I remember the whole story making me more angry than I’d been in quite some time. There’s not much in life that makes me THAT angry (yes, including moving and/or being stuck in traffic).

There’s a girl in my life, Lillian, that moved to California from Colorado a couple years ago. I was quite sad. She could make my day very very easily. So it’s sad a lot to not see her at church every week. Anyway, she came back to Denver for a visit one time and her dad (a former pastor of mine and Todd’s) was telling me that school was kind of sucking rocks for Lill at the moment and when he told me why, I about flew off the fucking handle. Some little brat kids in her class were making fun of her because she has glasses and other such nonsense. Honestly. What kind of crap is that?! I actually got so enraged that I had to leave the party for a few minutes to calm down. Yeah, it was that bad. Lillian is quite possibly the sweetest, kindest, warmest, most loving person you will EVER meet. She would never judge another person, never look down on someone, never think less of anyone. And THIS is the kind of shit she gets in return?! Unacceptable.

As creepy as the movie is, there’s a scene in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle where the nanny, Peyton, finds out that some boys are picking on the little girl and says: I got a message for you, Roth! LEAVE EMMA ALONE! Look at me – if you don’t, I’m gonna rip your fucking head off! That’s kind of how I felt about the kids that were making fun on Lillian.

Fortunately, Lillian ended up making some wicked awesome friends at her new school and church and everything worked out perfectly for her. She’s moving to Kansas right now, actually, and I really really really hope that things are just as perfect for her there.

At any rate, my irritation with social injustice has now extended to double-standards, but with substantially less ferocity.

I’m so done with people making up rules and placing them on some people, but not on others. It’s incredibly frustrating. It happens at the office a lot. I love that some people are allowed to take “extended” lunches without question, but when I get back 5 minutes late (this has happened maybe 3 times in the 2 1/2 years I’ve worked here), I practically get lynched for it. I really just don’t understand why. There are other instances of this that I could get into (many many instances), but I won’t merely to save myself the anger. It makes me break out and I’m not interested.

My favorite is that I was told back in April that I’d been recommended for a promotion (that would likely come with a raise), then in May – around my birthday – I was told that the promotion went through and that we were just waiting on the paperwork to be completed. It was said that May 19 would be my official promotion date blah blah blah. By June 15, I’d neither heard of nor seen any paperwork to that effect so I talked to my boss’s boss (since my boss was out of town) and was told that I “would be taken care of” and that it would probably happen “by the first of the month”. I didn’t realize until after than conversation that the “first of the month” had passed already and we were well into the “end of the month”. I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the whole situation because of all the work and responsibilities that I have and for other misc. reasons that I don’t want to get into right now. But people have been giving me either mis-information or contradictory information for almost 2 months now and I don’t know what to think. That’s not true. What I think is that it’s really difficult to stay motivated and hard-working when this kind of crap is going on. Really hard. I do good work and I want to be recognized for it. And I want what everyone at the office thinks I’ve gotten (a promotion) to be true. Yeah, really annoying that everyone THINKS I’ve been promoted, when I really haven’t. Awesome. Fun to be congratulated on something that I don’t have. Sweet. So I keep working hard, but each day that passes is another day I haven’t gotten my alleged raise or promotion. Sigh.